To Hell and Back: Alcoholism, Addiction and Lessons They Taught Me by Jim Coyle is a powerful must read story on addiction, alcoholism and recovery...
"It's said around the circles of recovery that when we start drinking alcoholically, we stop growing emotionally. We suffer arrested development at the stage in which the addiction takes hold. This happens, it seems to me now, because we stop doing the things we need to do to grow up. First, we don't make decisions. In my case, I would attach myself to a girlfriend and let her make all decisions - then I had someone to blame if they didn't work out. Second, we don't accept consequences. We usually have two tools for relating to the world and the people in it - blaming and rationalization. There's always somebody or a workplace or an institution thwarting our plans for an ideal relationship, job, life. Nothing was ever our fault. Third, we don't truly feel pain, often life's best tutor. We're usually anesthetized, and always so in reaction to problems or crises, real or perceived ...
Social drinkers might occasionally exaggerate their consumption, the better to pose as characters. Problem drinkers almost always minimize, covering their consumption in vague, comforting terms that make their drinking sound modest, unthreatening, almost wholesome, even patriotic. Denial is a powerful thing. The alcoholic-addict needs it to protect the sham sense of self he or she has constructed. A family troubled by addiction needs it to justify the sick contortions into which it has twisted itself to accommodate the bizarre behaviour of a loved one. Friends and co-workers play along with the con because, well, it's usually just easier that way" (http://rosemarykeevil.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/hell_and_backjpg-size-xxlarge-letterbox-version-2.jpg).
"It's said around the circles of recovery that when we start drinking alcoholically, we stop growing emotionally. We suffer arrested development at the stage in which the addiction takes hold. This happens, it seems to me now, because we stop doing the things we need to do to grow up. First, we don't make decisions. In my case, I would attach myself to a girlfriend and let her make all decisions - then I had someone to blame if they didn't work out. Second, we don't accept consequences. We usually have two tools for relating to the world and the people in it - blaming and rationalization. There's always somebody or a workplace or an institution thwarting our plans for an ideal relationship, job, life. Nothing was ever our fault. Third, we don't truly feel pain, often life's best tutor. We're usually anesthetized, and always so in reaction to problems or crises, real or perceived ...
Social drinkers might occasionally exaggerate their consumption, the better to pose as characters. Problem drinkers almost always minimize, covering their consumption in vague, comforting terms that make their drinking sound modest, unthreatening, almost wholesome, even patriotic. Denial is a powerful thing. The alcoholic-addict needs it to protect the sham sense of self he or she has constructed. A family troubled by addiction needs it to justify the sick contortions into which it has twisted itself to accommodate the bizarre behaviour of a loved one. Friends and co-workers play along with the con because, well, it's usually just easier that way" (http://rosemarykeevil.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/hell_and_backjpg-size-xxlarge-letterbox-version-2.jpg).
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